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New Optimism on Resveratrol

By Nicholas Wade March 11, 2013 3:06 pmMarch 11, 2013 3:06 pm

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Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

A cloud has long hung over the intriguing thesis that resveratrol, a minor ingredient of red wine, activates cellular proteins known as sirtuins that promote longer life in laboratory worms, flies and mice.

Critics have suggested that there were errors in the original experiments and that resveratrol did not in fact activate sirtuins directly. If so, resveratrol would lose much of its scientific interest because its link to the sirtuin would be unclear. But a new study led by David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, who in 2003 was a discoverer of resveratrol’s role in activating sirtuins, found that resveratrol did indeed influence sirtuin directly, though in a more complicated way than previously thought. Resveratrol appears to work by changing the shape of the sirtuin proteins in a cell. Thus activated, the sirtuins do several things, one of which is to switch on a second protein that spurs production of the mitochondria, which provide the cell’s energy. This would explain why mice treated with resveratrol ran twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion as untreated mice.

The exact knowledge of resveratrol’s mode of action, if confirmed, is welcome news for Sirtris, the company Dr. Sinclair helped found to explore whether resveratrol-mimicking drugs could avert the diseases of aging. Resveratrol itself is not ideal as a drug, for technical and patent reasons.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/12/2013, on page D4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Nutrition: New Optimism on Resveratrol.